Viewtopia 03/16/10: Top 5 DVDs of the Week (With Video!)

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Ninja Assassin (2009)

Unlike last week's retro-actioner Ninja, Ninja Assassin is a hyper-kinetic, ultra-violent martial arts epic for the Xbox generation. Produced by the Wachowski Brothers, who were so impressed with Rain's ninja sequences in their Speed Racer that they gave him his own film. Scripted by comic book writers Matthew Sand and J. Michael Straczynski, Ninja Assassin was directed by Wachowski collaborator James McTeigue. Raizo (Rain) is trained from childhood in the ninja arts by Lord Ozunu (the legendary Sho Kosugi), only to rebel against the clan when he feels betrayed.

Extras include:

* The Myth and Legend of the Ninja

* The Extreme Sport of a Ninja

* Training Rain

* Deleted Scenes

Breaking Bad: The Complete Second Season (2009)

With the healthcare debate raging, a show about a terminally ill chemistry teacher making crystal meth to pay for his treatment sounds all too real. That's the dark beauty of Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad, a series that shows how thin the line separating citizens from criminals truly is. While season one showed High School teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) diagnosed with cancer and the desperate measures he is forced to take in order to provide for his pregnant wife and disabled son, season two deals with the emotional ramifications his secret life is having on his family.

The Fourth Kind (2009)

Cinematic sleight-of-hand has always existed to both push audience's buttons and tweak their expectations and this grand tradition continues to this very day with The Haunting in Connecticut's "Based on True Events" tagline or the promise of Paranormal Activity's found footage. The Fourth Kind, whose name plays on astronomer J. Allen Hynek's classification scale of close encounters with aliens, purports to be based on a true story (actress Milla Jovovich even says so in the film's preamble), but it's all an elaborate set-up for an unconventional horror movie.

Extras include:

* Deleted Scenes

Mystery Science Theater 3000: XVII (2010)

"So many MiSTies, so little time," has never seemed more true than with Shout! Factory's latest set of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes. Of the long-running cult comedy's 198 episodes, only 81 (not including MST3K: The Movie) are on DVD, and many of those are now out of print. Like previous releases, Collection XVII includes two episodes starring series creator Joel Hodgson, and two more with his replacement, Mike Nelson. While neither of Joel's episodes, including the first scripted episode for The Comedy Channel (101: The Crawling Eye), are classic fare, Mike's episodes are two of the best from the Sci-Fi Channel years (including Tjardus Greidanus' infamous student film, 910: The Final Sacrifice).

The Vengeance Trilogy (2010)

Korean director Park Chan-wook literally burst onto the international scene in 2000 with his cinematic tour-de-force, Joint Security Area. Park quickly followed this up with three of the most-talked about films of the decade, The Vengeance Trilogy consisting of 2002's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, 2003's Oldboy and 2005's Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (which was shortened to Lady Vengeance in the West. More of a spiritual trilogy than a literal one, Park's films examine the human condition and it's utterly unique pursuit of such a meaningless thing.